THE FIRST EDITION of this book began as a conversation on the
foundational nature of environmental ethics—by which the
authors mean that virtually every area of ethics today involves taking account of the claims of the environment and that, conversely, environmental ethics involves virtually all other existing areas of ethics. At one level
the penetration of the environment into the ethics of public policy debate
has been clear: We are not surprised to see government offices, the business
boardroom, or farmers involved in debates about environmental regulation
and ethics. The newspapers and television and radio news are full of such
coverage. Nor are we surprised by the expansion of personal ethics among
much of the population to include issues such as recycling, not littering,
installing appliances (washers, toilets, showers) that conserve water, driving
vehicles with high gas mileage, not wearing animal fur or using products
utilizing animal testing, and vegetarianism. All of these concerns are well
represented among university students, as well as among much of the general public.

Earlier casebooks in environmental ethics—such as Watersheds: Classic
Cases in Environmental Ethics by Lisa H. Newton and Catherine K. Dillingham—strongly linked environmental, public policy, and business ethics,
focusing on issues in environmental politics that became major media
events: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez, and others. But
technological change has brought other areas of human life into contention
with environmental ethics and broken down existing boundaries between
ethical subfields. Technologies that allow humans to consider raiding animals for replacement organs or that create genetically modified crops and
allow scientists to “restore” wilderness all raise anew two issues: to what

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